She dried her hands on the towel and looked out at the dark garden, and I leaned on the counter and looked at her, and for a while neither of us bothered with words.
"It's strange," she said. "Being here."
"I'd imagine."
"Not a bad strange." A pause. "Just strange." She looked down at the towel. "I keep waiting for it to feel wrong. Being in their house. Eating their food." She set the towel down. "It doesn't feel wrong."
"Good," I said.
She glanced over. "Don't make too much of that."
"I'm not making anything of it," I said. "I'm just glad. Selfishly, mostly. I did cook since four."
The look she gave me then had something in it that wasn't quite a smile but paid rent in the same building. She nodded once, some private thing decided, said goodnight, and left the kitchen.
I listened to her footsteps on the stairs. I listened to her door close.
I stood in the kitchen that smelled of lamb stew and apple tart and her mother's recipes, looking out at the dark Dunraven garden, and I thought about a fifteen-year-old girl running through the night away from this town, and a thirty-year-old woman walking back into it, and how much has to happen to a person in the space between those two.
I thought about her eyes closing for that one second over the apple tart.
Then I turned off the kitchen light and went to find Ronan.
He needed to hear about that second.
11
SIENNA
I waited until the house was quiet.
That took longer than I expected. The Kerrigan estate settled into itself slowly at night. Footsteps moving through corridors, a door closing somewhere, the low murmur of voices that eventually tapered off into nothing. I sat on the edge of my bed with the thumb drive in my hand and waited, the way I've learned to wait for everything, with the patience of someone who knows timing is the difference between doing a thing well and doing it badly.
When the house was finally quiet, I opened my laptop and plugged in the drive.
Ronan had organized it.
That shouldn't have surprised me. He was the kind of man who brought order to things that resisted it. But it did. Files labeled by date, by who was present, by the subject of the conversation. Years of his father's recordings, sorted by someone who'd gone through all of it and understood what it held.
He'd done this for me.
I opened the oldest file first.
My father's voice.
I'd heard it twice now in the Chicago bar and told myself I'd built a tolerance to it, the way a person builds a tolerance to anything that hurts, through exposure, through the slow work of making the unbearable familiar. I was wrong. There's no tolerance. There's just the same gut-punch every time, the same arrest of breath, the same need to press my hand flat to something solid until the wave passes.
I pressed my hand to the bed. I listened.
He was younger in this one. I heard it, not in the pitch, which was always the same low register, but in the pace. Quicker. Less considered. The voice of a man who hadn't yet learned the patience that comes with leading a family through things that require it. Maybe thirty here. I didn't exist yet, or barely.
He talked about the future.
He talked about it the way men in our world talk about the future, in territory and alliances and the long slow chess of it. But under the business language, there was something else. It took me three listens to find it, because the first two times I didn't know to listen for it.
He was afraid.
Not of anything specific. Of the future itself. Of what it would ask of the people he loved. Of whether he'd be able to give them what they needed when it came for them.
